Word: caravaggio
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Molten Light. Rembrandt's early popularity among his countrymen (who were to spurn the full flowering of his genius) was solidly rooted in the artistic techniques of both Italy and northern Europe. His early teacher in Leiden had studied in Italy, there learned Caravaggio's trick of sharply contrasting light and shadow, to make light itself the most dramatic element in the picture. Rembrandt's painting, Jeremiah Lamenting the Destruction of Jerusalem, done when the artist was only 24, already shows both Rembrandt's love of Biblical subjects and the virtuoso control of light that gives...
...showed the influence of the European expressionists Chaim Soutine and Oskar Kokoshka. He applied their color-by-the-gob technique to molten-seeming canvases of rabbis, chandeliers, brides, Christmas trees, buried treasure and, finally, corpses. At 40, Bloom exercises a control of his medium as elaborate, and theatrical, as Caravaggio's. His steady gain in dexterity is offset by a restriction of range: for a full decade now, Bloom has concentrated on dead flesh, often disemboweled and usually human...
...Caravaggio's career was as brief as it was spectacular. A notorious brawler, he eventually stabbed and killed a crony in a dispute over a tennis score, and had to flee Rome. He found refuge at Malta, where he painted a portrait of the Grand Master and was rewarded with a knighthood. But then he assaulted a fellow knight and was imprisoned. He escaped, made his way to Tuscany, was arrested for a crime he had not committed. Soon afterward, he died of fever. He was then...
Into the Future. Had he lived longer, says Hinks, Caravaggio "might even have diverted the whole course of seicento [17th century] painting." Even as it was, he inspired dozens of later masters. Rubens borrowed from his swirling, figure-full compositions; Vermeer took over and refined his trick of illuminating dim interiors with dramatic shafts of light; Rembrandt adapted to deeper use his habit of painting the faces of real people mysteriously veiled in shadow; Georges de La Tour appropriated his favored color scheme (red on black); Velasquez, the realest of realists, gained conviction from Caravaggio's absolute devotion...
...celebrate the rediscovery of Caravaggio's Ecce Homo, Genoa borrowed Cigoli's version from Florence and displayed the two together. Visitors thronging the gallery at the rate of a thousand a day, agreed with Expert Roberto Longhi that Caravaggio's version is one of his "most moving works," and much superior to Cigoli's canvas. Caravaggio had at last won the competition he lost to his rival Cigoli 3½ centuries...